Entries from July 2006
This third international workshop on Modeling and Retrieval of Context MRC 2006 was–again–a success. About 20 people participated in the workshop. This time even more emphasis was laid on discussions than on presentations. Seven papers were presented accompanied by a session with four posters and a demonstration session with six (!) applications (see agenda for details and presentation slides).
Day 1, as usual, was used to warm up to each other. We started with presentations and, as the first highlight, Anind Dey’s invited talk on “Usability in Context-Aware Applications” where he gave a broad overview of his work at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
As it is kind of tradition now in my workshops the participants collected topics of interest for discussion during and–that is always the hope!–after the workshop. Two topics were discussed: Context representation and context schema requirements (lead by Philipp Mohr) and Evaluation of context elicitation and context models (lead by Sven Schwarz and David Vallet). A short report on the results remains to be written and put up on the workshop website. It was nice to see groups of workshop participants sitting together during the main conference days discussing topics further.
Following another tradition of this workshop series most of us headed out for a joint dinner at a seafood restaurant called Barking Crab. This restaurant “with picnic table atmosphere” was suggested by another passenger on the flight to Boston who happened to sit next to me on the plane and who grew up in Boston. Photos from this event will be put up on the workshop website. You will see that we all enjoyed the evening and the good food.
After getting to know each other a little bit better on the evening before, the next day started much easier as you can imagine. The main event on day 2 was the demo session. Each presenter described his demo briefly to the audience before each workshop participant could pick which demo he or she was most interested in. The demos then were presented and discussed in small groups.
The selected topics were intensely discussed in the afternoon before Sven Schwarz together with David Vallet and Philipp Mohr together with Richard Dapoigny presented preliminary results. As it turned out Sven’s and David’s topic could be laid to rest whereas more results are to be expected from the second group. Check the workshop website for more details later.
It is not yet clear whether there will be an MRC workshop in 2007. Stefan Schulz and I applied for hosting CONTEXT 2007 in Kaiserslautern. David Leake, who already organized MRC 2005 and 2006 with us, suggested this idea, backed up by Anind Dey and Roy Turner as we learned at the workshop. Keep your fingers crossed!
Categories: Context · English · Event · Research
Attending AAAI-06 in Boston and visiting this city are in itself things I am looking forward to very much and for a long time now. But it still gets better: I am going to visit MIT and the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. I will give a presentation on Nepomuk – The Social Semantic Desktop at his research lab.
Categories: English · Semantic Web
Thilo Deussen–a student of Philosophy and Computer Science at University of Ulm and currently working at SAP Research, Karlsruhe–got me thinking when he pointed me to the Get a Mac ads. Wouldn’t it be great to have such kind of advertisements for the upcoming Social Semantic Desktop? Imagine an Information Retrieval based Google Desktop Search talking to a Nepomuk-enabled system, discussing, or better, describing the benefits of the latter system. Maybe we should set up a competition within the Nepomuk consortium, or beyond.
Categories: English · Thoughts & Ideas
The biennial knowledge management conference “Professionelles Wissensmanagement WM 2007“–this time in Potsdam, near Berlin Germany–called for workshop proposals. This conference provides an interesting environment for researchers as well as practitioners for discussing ideas on individual knowledge work, especially with regard to the Nepomuk project. I wrote a proposal with colleagues at DFKI, Kaiserslautern, and FU Berlin. Hopefully, it will get accepted.
Categories: English · Event · Research
I learned today about this future desktop prototype: BumpTop 3D. Watch the video there and learn how a 3D desktop could look like.
“BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world.”
Categories: English · Research
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The Nepomuk workshop last week in Galway, Ireland, triggered many activities and thoughts as you may notice on my Blog. When I talked with Cédric Mesnage about improving one’s English writing skills I told him about a helpful little book, which he already seemed to know: “The elements of style” by William Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White. This small volume dates back to 1918, but is still up to date. As the Boston Globe states on the back cover of the fourth edition: “No book in shorter space, with fewer words, will help any writer more than this persistent little volume.”
Check it out!
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Categories: English · Tips, Tricks, Tools
I took another step into the quite interesting world of Social Software by registering with del.icio.us and linking my blog to it. Let’s share.
Categories: English · Web 2.0
Working with long texts over a long period of time places a heavy cognitive load on an author of such work. One needs to keep in mind many facets of each character. What is her hair colour? What colour are his eyes? Where is the character at which point of the story? Wouldn’t it be great to ask this system to highlight all places in the text where–let’s say–Joe and Susan have scenes together or where Susan has a scene with someone else. It then would be much easier to rewrite scenes (e.g., replacing one character with another one or putting the characters to another location). Moving in the manuscript by means of semantic querying and browsing, and not by syntactical means.
Musing about Semantic Web applications I could easily envision some tool that helps keeping track of such details and helps keeping the respective universe consistent. This idea is almost certainly not a new idea. But maybe the Nepomuk system will provide such features using the text analysis components together with Leo’s Rebith machine?
Well, we’ll see, won’t we?
Categories: English · Thoughts & Ideas
